May 30, 2010

Dennis Hopper and the need for "frenzy"

Dennis Hopper scared the hell out of me in 1986. As Frank Booth, the worst father figure a boy detective ever had, Hopper slithered like a python through the nightmare that is David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.”That same year Hopper broke a lot of hearts as the town drunk struggling to clean up in “Hoosiers.”

Danger was Hopper’s middle name. He was, in fact, Uncle Danger. But those wild eyes could convey something other than menace, and they spoke more than one language.

With Gene Hackman, courtside in "Hoosiers."

For the inspirational basketball film, Hopper received his sole Academy Award acting nomination. It’s strong work. His work in “Blue Velvet” goes beyond strong; it’s more like a hundred knives being thrown at your head, and the vileness of Hopper’s portrayal is tempered with a sense of humor — an awful, awful sense of humor, as well as an unholy amount of actorly relish — that seals the deal.

There’s a moment when Frank, eager to hit the town and cause some trouble, announces that he’s interested in accommodating anything that moves. Hopper cackles that unforgettable, rascally Hopper cackle. And then, poof: He disappears into thin air, leaving only the cackle behind.

Now the actor is gone, too, dead at age 74. He spent a lot of his film career getting killed off in Westerns. Hopper played the horse thief, Moon, in “True Grit” (1969), a movie I saw with my folks and my brother at the old Westgate drive-in on the west side of Racine, Wis. I was 8. I was not yet aware of the phenomenon that was “Easy Rider,” a different sort of Western released that same year.

Hopper in "Easy Rider."

Hopper directed “Easy Rider,” co-starring with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson and God knows how many substances, co-writing the script with Fonda and Terry Southern. The whole thing nearly blew apart during filming. It went on to explode Hollywood’s relationship to the audience, particularly the counterculture, in ways still being debated and mourned over. Everybody with a checkbook tried to recapture that film’s success, for a while.

Hopper’s temporarily golden directorial career tarnished quickly. After the dully hallucinatory folly that was “The Last Movie” (1971), Hopper fell down the rabbit-hole and, while acting a good deal, didn’t fully re-emerge until “Apocalypse Now” in 1979. In Francis Coppola’s monster he played the Puck-like maniac with the cameras, at the end of the river.

Who knows? Maybe he modeled the character on Shakespeare’s Puck. When he was a classically trained upstart Hopper took a meeting in 1955 with Columbia Pictures’ Harry Cohn, who suggested that an aide take Hopper away for six months in order to “take all the Shakespeare out of him.” Hopper told Cohn to scram.

What got him noticed by Cohn in the first place? A seizure. On an early ’55 episode of the NBC series “Medic” Hopper played an epileptic. Convincingly. Scarily.

“There are moments that I’ve had some real brilliance, you know,” Hopper once said. “But I think they are moments. And sometimes, in a career, moments are enough.”

Hopper told James Lipton of “Inside the Actors Studio” that he saw Brando in “Viva Zapata!” the same year he saw Montgomery Clift in “A Place in the Sun.” (This was in 1952, though “Sun” first came out in ’51.) By then Hopper had committed himself to studying Laurence Olivier and his peers. Brando and Clift, however, reoriented his entire way of thinking. Here was something new, Hopper thought — feelings, half-formed but vivid, in between the lines.

A 1950s publicity still, misleadingly wholesome.

When Hopper met James Dean, he met his ideal, always a dangerous thing to meet when you’re a young actor. Watch Hopper as a leather-jacketed thug in “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955) and a year later as a sensitive soul in “Giant,” and you see a journeyman performer striving to do what Dean was doing naturally (if often indulgently): behaving, unpredictably and honestly.

Through addiction years and clean ones, Hopper kept working and fighting his own honestly earned reputation as a pain. By the time Hopper enjoyed his remarkable comeback in 1986, the year in which he appeared as human demon in “Blue Velvet” and holy fool in “Hoosiers,” he’d learned how to meet directors halfway, or to fake it, as well as how to serve the material and keep his own creative juices flowing. He had become the actor he always knew he could be.

In some rambling interview footage filmed in the early ‘70s Hopper nervously recounts his adolescent longings for, among others, Elizabeth Taylor and Leslie Caron. As a teenager he’d cry over Caron sometimes, he says, just the sheer movie-star glow of her. His cure for such yearning? The cliched artist’s cure for everything, Hopper says: “More loneliness, more isolation, more frenzy.”

With Sandra Bullock, in "Speed."

With Hopper’s screen work we remember the frenzy first and last of all, the contained or unleashed fury in his eyes. He made millions from it, playing villains in “Speed” and “Waterworld” in the mid-‘90s. His performance in “Blue Velvet” was altogether different and more haunting. It’s the work of an actor possessed, firmly in control of an out-of-control character.

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